Politics in Chicago

The counting machine

RICHARD DALEY has been elected to office 13 times by Chicago voters, including four times as mayor. Now he is turning his prodigious organisational skills to a different purpose: counting Chicagoans.

Census workers are scheduled to finish their work in Chicago on July 7th. The mayor is now “pulling out all the stops” to make sure as many Chicagoans as possible stand up and are counted before then. The city will spend $400,000 on television and radio advertisements. And one of the western world's great political machines is humming into action. The mayor is meeting leaders of assorted ethnic groups to urge their co-operation; his foot-soldiers are out on the streets, talking to senior-citizen groups and tangling with the managers of high-rise apartment buildings whose over-zealous doormen have not allowed census workers past the lobby.

This census blitz, which is happening to a milder degree in other cities, is about more than civic pride. Mr Daley's men reckon that 159,000 residents were missed in 1990. (The census people put the undercount at just over 67,000.) A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers calculated that each missed resident costs the city $3,391 in lost state and federal aid.

Road warriors

Using the mayor's figures, a similar undercount in 2000 would deprive Chicago of $539m in revenue over the next decade. Mayor Daley has been quick to put that figure in concrete terms—literally. It is enough money to resurface every residential street in Chicago, he says, or to build ten new schools and renovate 200 others. The official census figures are also used to determine the number of representatives Chicago sends to Washington, DC, and to Springfield, the state capital.

Why so many people missing? Chicago has the same hard-to-count groups as other big cities: transient university students, immigrants who would rather not answer questions from the government, large poor and homeless populations. The city's older housing stock has been subdivided in elusive (and often illegal) ways. One of Mr Daley's first ploys was to hire a consultant who helped to find 92,000 addresses that were not on the official census address list.

There also seems to be something of an ethnic mismatch. One of the city's largest immigrant groups is Polish, and there has been a recent wave of immigration from Russia and the former Yugoslavia. Yet census workers are more likely to speak Spanish or one of several Asian languages.

The Census Bureau used statistical sampling after the 1990 census to calculate that a net figure of 4m Americans (1.6% of the population) had been overlooked. The proportion was twice as high in some of America's largest cities. Democrats, like Mr Daley, would like to see statistical patches applied to these census shortcomings. Republicans, recognising that the groups most likely to be missed (blacks, Latinos and the poor) live in Democratic districts and tend to vote that way, prefer the old-fashioned way of counting. The Supreme Court ruled last year that sampling cannot be used to apportion congressional seats among the states.

The Census Bureau is confident that it can round up more people this time. “This is nothing more than a manpower issue. We've been knocking on doors since 1790,” says one official. On the other hand it is plain that local enthusiasm counts a lot. From this perspective, Mr Daley's census blitz is good, old-fashioned machine politics at its door-knocking best. Pushing up the numbers will probably pay some political dividends for the mayor. But Chicago, too, should gain.